created on Tue, 2005-01-25 11:03

At the BBS05, I attended D.L. Byron and Molly Holzschlag's presentation "Picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared".

This is going to sort of be a rebuttal, and sort of an expansion (and, this being the site it is, a bit of an explanation of where Bryght/Drupal fits into this space, although I'm going to kind of sneak that in at the end).

(Note to conference website: provide a trackbackable-entry for each presentation, that way we get to see all comments in one place)

I had asked a question in Molly's earlier talk essentially asking "What is a blog?". My view on the matter is that a "blog" is just a certain set of features (roughly: reverse chronological posting, "permalinks", comments, and an RSS feed). There are certain dedicated tools that only do blogging today, but these "blog features" are going to migrate into all sorts of other tools, from CMS's to project management tools.

As well, my opinion is that we are already moving beyond the abilities/scope of most personal "blogging tools" in business.

Molly and D.L. had 4 categories, and I've included the examples they used:

1. Commercial: AOL Hometown Journals, MSN Spaces (my label: Free Hosted)
2. Hosted Service: TypePad, Blogger (my label: Commercially Hosted)
3. Server-side Solutions: MovableType, WordPress
4. Roll your own

I'm going to skip the "roll your own" category; this is absolutely not a good long term strategy except in very specific situations. Usually, vertically integrated websites that are the business, and even then you should evaluate existing codebases as a stepping stone.

Commercial

I don't actually like the name for this section at all. When I hear "commercial", I think commercial for-sale software. When I think of AOL and MSN Spaces, I think either Free or Hosted (both of which apply). Blogger (or at the very least, its Blogspot service) should also be in this category.

Next up, one of the "cons" listed for these services was that they are not "scalable". Robert Scoble was a little confused by this one as well (MSN Spaces has something in the neighbourhood of 1.7 million blogs), as the regular definition of scalable is that the system can handle large amounts of traffic, content, etc. From later comments, I can only surmise that Molly actually meant "flexible" or perhaps "customizable". To the latter definition I would agree – you get only what's included with these services, and since they are hosted, features and functionality are limited by whatever improvements happen to be added. The exception is Blogger, because you can get some more flexibility by publishing to your own server via FTP instead of using the fully-hosted Blogspot domains. It's also got pretty good built-in template customization options if you want to move beyond the bundled templates.

Hosted

My label for this category would be "Commercially Hosted".

I didn't have too many beefs with this section, except that I would move Blogger to the previous category, and definitely add Blogware. Which also leaves only TypePad and Blogware in this section. Bryght (while small) would also be in this category, as would SquareSpace and 21Publish, although we all fit into a sort of "blogging++" category, and have differing levels of customization available.

TypePad is only available from SixApart and has no reseller system. Well, you could of course pay for TypePad directly and charge your customers more, but as far as I know, there are no reseller discounts or other customization available (except potentially very large white-label solutions, which Marc Canter briefly mentioned but I don't know anything about).

Blogware is an excellent choice for consultants that want to provide clients with a blogging-only solution that they can resell directly while having the technical details of hosting, software configuration, and upgrades professionally outsourced.

Server-side

There are a ton of choices here, and the list is growing as more tools add blogging capability. MovableType is the grand-daddy of them all. WordPress is the younger open-source upstart. These two are pure blogging platforms, although MT does get abused for wider content management through customization.

Roll your own

I firmly believe that only very large companies (perhaps with an existing investment in internal software) should consider rolling their own solution. Even with large companies, picking a platform of some kind -- whether it be commercial software, open source, or white-labelling a hosted tool -- means that they don't have to go it alone when it comes to updates, maintenance, and additional features over the long term. If you do roll your own, pay very close attention to standards -- the more open formats and specifications you work with, the easier it is to interact with the rest of the world.

Anything missing?

I think a (short) discussion of some of the main points to consider between hosted and self-installed, and commercial vs. open source would have been very helpful. There is a fairly short decision tree to follow here which can help businesses cut down the number of options they need to consider.

Recommendations

1. Get a domain name: Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go and spend $10 to register a domain name. If you switch platforms, change your mind, change your site structure, or anything like that, having your own domain name will make things much, much easier.
2. If you're not even sure if this whole blogging thing is for you yet, start with free services and/or a free demo. Don't worry too much about getting things wrong, just participate in the process and try out some options. Use Bloglines as your news aggregator, and my recommendation is Blogger on your own domain (repeat after me: I will blog at my own domain name, no matter what)
3. Do you have a website already? How do you update it today? A blog might be a separate, companion destination to a main website, it might be fully integrated, or a mixture of the two. If you don't already have an easy way to edit static content on an existing website....get a Bryght site.
4. There are people that can help (and many of them were at BBS05). Make sure that they have a good mix of technical, marketing, and design skills, or can draw on those resources. Consider picking someone that is familiar with several platforms and can help review your requirements.

Tris Hussey put some similar tips together, including saying some nice things about us.

Huh, I hardly mentioned Bryght at all. Well, in this Web 2.0 world, where people are just starting to get the hang of blogging, Bryght is a whole other mouthful. It has full blogging features, but it's pretty darn close to a complete content management system, too (i.e. you can run your whole website on it, not just the bloggy bits). It also happens to be perfect for large online communities, and even has a dash or two of social networking features thrown in.

If you want a hosted turn-key solution that does all this...that's Bryght ("Commercially Hosted"). If you want to get this on your server and do your own customization ("Server side"), get Drupal, which is the open source code that Bryght is based on.

Molly and D.L. (I keep wanting to say "Download" Byron in my head) – thanks for giving me a presentation to bounce some ideas off of. Catch you on the trackback :P